Free Bear Claw Conspiracy by Jessica Andersen

going to make a difference.
    Gigi touched the picture and swallowed to loosen her too-tight throat.
    Initially, she had been committed to the case because she was committed to every case that came through her hands, especially when it was a violent crime. More, the victim was a woman close to her age, working in a male-dominated field. There was kinship there. Sympathy.
    Another layer had been added when she tangled with Blackthorn, making her determined to show him what she was capable of.
    Now, though, she shifted all the way onto the treacherous footing of involvement…which could either help or hinder an analyst.
    Usually, with her, it helped.
    “So get to work,” she told herself.
    In the evidence locker, she hesitated over the pencil sketch of Jerry Osage, but decided to wait on processing it. Copies had been sent around, and the rangers were going to check out a couple of the depleted waterfalls in their sectors and see if they could match the background, but she had a feeling they had gotten what they were going to get out of the sketch.
    Tanya’s clothing was bagged and tagged, as were the hikers’ duds, but Tanya had been moved around so much that trace was likely to be a nightmare, and the hikers were incidental. Of the stuff Gigi herself had collected at the scene, there were really only two things that sparked her instincts: the feather and the radio.
    She started with the radio, on the theory that if Tanya had been attacked somewhere else, the radio smashed there, then her attackers had probably been the ones to move it. Which might mean they had handled it, maybe even left a print or two.
    An hour later, though, she didn’t have much. She had gotten three smudged partials that matched Tanya’s prints, a couple of hits for each of the other rangers—which was consistent with what Blackthorn had said about the radios being up for grabs—and one really smeared thumb print that didn’t belong to any of them, but had retained almost zero detail. She could make out part of one whorl and guess at a couple of the other landmarks, but it wouldn’t hold up to any sort of database search.
    That was usually the score when it came to crime-scene analysis: five percent big foam fingers, ninety-five percent packing peanuts.
    “Let’s see if the tech-heads can make anything out of you,” she said to the smashed radio. “Maybe they can resuscitate you and get your GPS to cough up something interesting.” She rebagged it, put her name on the next line down, and logged it back into the evidence locker.
    Then she went for the bag with Blackthorn’s shirt in it. And caught herself hesitating.
    For crap’s sake, Lynd, it’s just a shirt. You can process it without picturing him naked. Half naked. Whatever.
    She did her best, anyway. It helped that Blackthorn had ended the evening by trying to run her off the case again. It was really too bad the fates had matched such a truly excellent body with that superior—and totally annoying—attitude.
    Remembering his look of horror when he’d heard she wanted to be a critical response cop made it easier to pull the uniform shirt out of the bag, spread it out and start going over it, working her way toward the chest pocket.
    His name tag was still in place, the engraved letters spelling out Matthew H. Blackthorn. She spent way too much effort not staring at it and wondering about the H. Under other circumstances, it would have made her nervous to realize how much she was thinking about him. As it was, she gave herself a pass and called it what it was: a defense mechanism.
    If she was thinking about Blackthorn’s great ass and borderline personality, she didn’t have to think about the fire…or worry about how she was going to smooth things over with Alyssa.
    They were good friends and clicked on a level that Gigi didn’t connect with many other people on, but now they were heading square into an argument they had skirted around once or twice before, knowing they